ANNIVERSARIES: Benjamin Britten's War Requiem premieres at reopening of Coventry Cathedral on May 30, 1962 | Dusty Wright's Culture Catch ANNIVERSARIES: Benjamin Britten's War Requiem premieres at reopening of Coventry Cathedral on May 30, 1962 May 29, 2006 - 02:24 — SteveHoltje If you'd like to listen to some appropriate music on Memorial Day (which, before we made most of our holidays fall on Mondays or Fridays because corporations like that better, always came on May 30), try this masterpiece. Sir Benjamin Britten wrote it for the consecration of St. Michael's Cathedral in Coventry and dedicated it to the memories of four servicemen who had been friends of his or of his longtime partner, the tenor Peter Pears, for whom one of the solo parts was written. The original Coventry Cathedral, dating from the 14th century, had been destroyed by a German air raid in 1940.

When, over two decades later, a new cathedral was built, the ruined walls of the old one were left standing, a reminder of both its architectural glory and its sad destruction. Britten's War Requiem, Op. 66, offers a complex, multi-layered response to the circumstances. There's no patriotism or "hurrah for our boys" here; instead, we are faced with not only religious texts but also the war poetry of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), which emphasizes our shared humanity regardless of nationality and decries the cataclysmic loss of life that took place in World War I. It was supposed to be "the war to end all wars"; it didn't, though it did end Owen's life (one week before the Armistice). Britten, an avowed pacifist, weaves starkly emotional settings (for the male soloists) of Owens's poems among the Latin text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead (sung by an adult choir augmented by a soprano soloist) and selected Latin anthems (sung by a children's choir, usually all boys), sometimes alternately, sometimes within a movement.

Accompanying the singers is a massive orchestra (actually two, one a chamber orchestra) and organ. Any performance of this genuinely monumental piece is a major undertaking and a big event. On a personal note, I have sung the War Requiem in the chorus, but my response to it is largely emotional rather than professional. It is a deeply powerful work; exhilarating in its achievement, fascinating in its artistry, but most of all capable of inspiring genuine tears. Tears of sadness at the senseless loss Owen depicts, and tears of rage that we still, even after so many examples of the wastefulness of war, let demagogues promulgate conflict. In some ways, the most unsettling movement is the shortest, Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), a plea for rest/peace after death that Britten juxtaposes with an Owen poem criticizing organized religion for having abandoned Christ, gone over to the dark side so to speak, and having switched allegiance to the State.

And when this conflicts with the extreme pacifism that Christ preached, it's the pacifism that's abandoned: "The scribes on all the people shove / And bawl allegiance to the state / But they who love the greater love / Lay down their life; they do not hate." When Owen then adds "Dona nobis pacem" (Grant us peace) from the Ordinary Mass version of the Agnus Dei, there are multiple levels of meaning and perhaps even sarcasm; Britten places it up against the chorus's "Dona eis requiem sempiternam" (Grant them eternal rest) from the Requiem text. All of this is accentuated by Britten's restless music, which moves with a steady tread through an unsettling scale that grants neither rest nor peace.

It is followed by the closing movement, Libera me, which mixes the Latin text -- including such fraught lines as the Mass's "Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal" and "May they rest in peace" and the boys' choir singing "In paradisum deducant te Angeli" (Into Paradise may the Angels lead thee) -- with Owen's "Strange Meeting," which is the crux of the War Requiem's meaning: two soldiers, one English, one German, meet on another plane of existence. The English soldier had killed the German soldier the day before; now they mourn together "the undone years," a phrase which cuts two ways. There have been a number of fine recordings of this work, starting with Britten's own.

In the recording studio, he was able to use the soprano soloist for whom he had written the part, the Russian Galina Vishnevskaya; the Soviet government, still angry over its massive losses in World War II at the hands of the German Army, was not ready for reconciliation, so Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva didn't let Vishnevskaya sing at the premiere (nor were the officially atheist Communists going to be sympathetic to anything religious). This had temporarily thwarted Britten's plan of uniting soloists from the Soviet Union, Germany (baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), and England (Pears), three nations that had suffered greatly in World War II, the war that had left the old cathedral a bombed-out shell. Britten's recording, on Decca, obviously has both historical significance and interpretive primacy, not to mention harrowing performances by all three soloists. But in several important aspects, Britten's recording is surpassed by Richard Hickox's 1991 recording on Chandos (which also includes fine performances of Britten's orchestra work Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20, and Ballad of Heroes, Op.

14 for tenor, chorus, and orchestra; both are also memorial works, though obviously of much smaller scope and less maturity). Having all British soloists may lose the symbolism of Britten's recording, but the Owen poems, in English, are more clearly sung by Hickox's bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk than by Fischer-Dieskau. Also, the sound is vastly superior, offering greater fullness and much more clarity (and it was also issued in 2003 as a hybrid Super Audio CD that's sonically superb). Nor is this recording without some historical significance of its own: the soprano soloist is Heather Harper, who subbed for Vishnevskaya at the premiere; Harper's Latin pronunciation is more practiced. Tenor Philip Langridge may not quite offer the interpretive brilliance of Pears, but his voice is better. Having both recordings is ideal, but choosing between them, Hickox's gets the nod. - Steve Holtje Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer. He has just finished recording his original soundtrack to Bystander, a documentary film by John Reilly.

The War Requiem Purpose The War Requiem was written for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral (the old cathedral is pictured at left), and was first performed there 30 May 1962. Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed during the Battle of Britain in World War II. Britten was commissioned to write a piece for the ceremony marking the completion of a new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, built along side the the ruins of the original millenium-old structure. Since the work was to be performed inside the new cathedral, it was a good acoustic challenge for Britten. The ceremony was comprised of several works, including Tippett 's opera King Priam. The War Requiem was not meant to be a pro-British piece or a glorification of British soldiers, but a public statement of Britten's anti-war convictions. It was a denunciation of the wickedness of war, not of other men.

The fact that Britten wrote the piece for three specific soloists -- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya), and a British tenor (Peter Pears) -- demonstrated that he had more than the losses of his own country in mind, and symbolized the importance of reconciliation. (Unfortunately Vishnevskaya was not available for the first performance, and had to be replaced by Heather Harper). The piece was also meant to be a warning to future generations of the senselessness of taking up arms against fellow men. It was dedicated to four of Britten's friends who were killed during World War I: Roger Burney, Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Piers Dunkerley, Captain, Royal Marines David Gill, Ordinary Seaman, Royal Navy Michael Halliday, Lieutenant, Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve The first London performance was on 6 Dec 1942, in Westminster Abbey. The Decca recording that we have used was recorded in 1963. The work received immediate critical acclaim and was hailed as a masterpiece. It was widely performed both in Britain and abroad.

Perhaps the combination of English poetry with the familiar text of the Latin mass made the Requiem accessible to such a range of listeners and caused it to be so well received. Later, the War Requiem was incorporated into a movie with the same name. The movie, which would have otherwise been silent, is a strange, dark work. Most of it seems completely pointless, which leaves one wondering if that was the intention -- to show how pointless war is. Text For the text of the War Requiem, Britten interspersed the Latin Mass for the Dead with nine poems written by Wilfred Owen (pictured at left), a World War I footsoldier who was killed a week before the Armistice. In total contrast to The Spirit of England, written by Britten's compatriot Edward Elgar , the War Requiem was a decidedly antiwar piece. The Spirit of England was also an epic work in which poetry was set to music, but it brought forth quite a different message.

Movie Review - - Review/Film; <br> Britten's 'War Requiem,' To Images by Derek Jarman - NYTimes.com Britten's 'War Requiem,' To Images by Derek Jarman By VINCENT CANBY Published: January 26, 1990 LEAD: Taking Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem,'' composed for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Derek Jarman has made a movie of epic irrelevance that, when it rises to the occasion, is merely redundant. It opens today at the Quad. Taking Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem,'' composed for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Derek Jarman has made a movie of epic irrelevance that, when it rises to the occasion, is merely redundant. It opens today at the Quad. The text for the Britten oratorio is based on the soaring Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead), sung in Latin, and the profoundly sorrowful, unsentimental poems of Wilfred Owen, the English poet who was 25 years old when he was killed in World War I, just a week before the Armistice.

The Britten work, thought by some to be his masterpiece, is an astonishing conjunction of the sacred and the profane. Unlike Rupert Brooke, Owen did not glorify war. Instead, he saw it to be a failure of Christianity. ''My subject,'' he wrote, ''is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'' No one connected to the filmed ''War Requiem'' seems to have considered the possibility that oratorios are far more effective when heard than seen. The film's soundtrack is provided by the 1963 ''War Requiem'' recording that Britten conducted at Kingsway Hall in London, with Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the soloists. There's nothing wrong with it, but most of the time, one doesn't hear any music at all. It's not because the level is off but because, in movies, images take precedence in the mind over sound. From beginning to end, the oratorio is upstaged by the mostly awful pictures on the screen. The style and tone are set by the introductory sequence, in which Laurence Olivier plays an ancient, wheelchair-bound Old Soldier.

As the audience watches Olivier on the screen, his voice can be heard on the soundtrack, reading the Owen poem (''I dreamed that out of battle I escaped'') that is key to the oratorio. As Olivier's Old Soldier fusses with his battle ribbons and indulges in other bits of actorly business, he slowly but successfully begins to obscure his own voice on the soundtrack. The soundtrack never recoups. This is all the more maddening because Mr. Jarman's choice of images is alternately so sentimental and so tacky. The film proceeds as a kind of free-association journey through the mind of the Poet (Nathaniel Parker), who stands in for Owen. The Poet has encounters with the Unknown Soldier (Owen Teale) and a nurse (Tilda Swinton) who also seems to be the soldier's sister. Sometimes he is seen in his trench quarters, late at night, composing poems. He wanders the battlefield. He sees himself as he meets, after his own death, the German soldier he has killed and who has killed him. ''I am the enemy you killed, my friend'' is the way it's put in the Owen poem. Mr.

Jarman, whose films include ''Sebastiane'' and ''Caravaggio,'' has a weakness for the sort of baroque image that is utterly beside the point of the work of both Britten and Owen, or too much. The Poet is presented with a crown of thorns made of the barbed wire of no-man's land. Later, the Poet, who is also everyman, is stripped to the waist by a mad doctor-priest, his hands tied behind him, the better to be whipped before an audience of leering, lubricious white-faced capitalists whose cheeks are wickedly rouged. Mr. Jarman decorates a movie as much as he directs it. He makes indiscriminate use here of newsreel footage from World War I through Vietnam, with some stock shots of an A-bomb explosion thrown in. The latter lends the film a piquant but transitory, apocalyptic effect. POETRY IN BATTLE - WAR REQUIEM, directed by Derek Jarman; screenplay by Mr.

Jarman, inspired by the oratorio by Benjamin Britten, based on poems by Wilfred Owen; director of photography, Richard Greatrex; edited by Rick Elgood; music by Britten; produced by Don Boyd; production company, Anglo International Films. At the Quad, 13th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. Running time: 92 minutes. This film has no rating.

THE CAST: Laurence Olivier, Nathaniel Parker, Tilda Swinton, Owen Teale, Patricia Hayes, Claire Davenport THE RECORDING: Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; the Bach Choir and London Symphony Orchestra Chorus; Highgate School Choir; Simon Preston, organist; Melos Ensemble; London Symphony Orchestra; conducted by Benjamin Britten Review/Film - Britten's 'War Requiem,' To Images by Derek Jarman - NYTimes.com Review/Film; Britten's 'War Requiem,' To Images by Derek Jarman By VINCENT CANBY Published: January 26, 1990 Taking Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem,'' composed for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Derek Jarman has made a movie of epic irrelevance that, when it rises to the occasion, is merely redundant. It opens today at the Quad.

The text for the Britten oratorio is based on the soaring Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead), sung in Latin, and the profoundly sorrowful, unsentimental poems of Wilfred Owen, the English poet who was 25 years old when he was killed in World War I, just a week before the Armistice. The Britten work, thought by some to be his masterpiece, is an astonishing conjunction of the sacred and the profane. Unlike Rupert Brooke, Owen did not glorify war. Instead, he saw it to be a failure of Christianity. ''My subject,'' he wrote, ''is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'' No one connected to the filmed ''War Requiem'' seems to have considered the possibility that oratorios are far more effective when heard than seen. The film's soundtrack is provided by the 1963 ''War Requiem'' recording that Britten conducted at Kingsway Hall in London, with Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the soloists. There's nothing wrong with it, but most of the time, one doesn't hear any music at all.

It's not because the level is off but because, in movies, images take precedence in the mind over sound. From beginning to end, the oratorio is upstaged by the mostly awful pictures on the screen. The style and tone are set by the introductory sequence, in which Laurence Olivier plays an ancient, wheelchair-bound Old Soldier. As the audience watches Olivier on the screen, his voice can be heard on the soundtrack, reading the Owen poem (''I dreamed that out of battle I escaped'') that is key to the oratorio. As Olivier's Old Soldier fusses with his battle ribbons and indulges in other bits of actorly business, he slowly but successfully begins to obscure his own voice on the soundtrack. The soundtrack never recoups. This is all the more maddening because Mr. Jarman's choice of images is alternately so sentimental and so tacky. The film proceeds as a kind of free-association journey through the mind of the Poet (Nathaniel Parker), who stands in for Owen. The Poet has encounters with the Unknown Soldier (Owen Teale) and a nurse (Tilda Swinton) who also seems to be the soldier's sister.

Sometimes he is seen in his trench quarters, late at night, composing poems. He wanders the battlefield. He sees himself as he meets, after his own death, the German soldier he has killed and who has killed him. ''I am the enemy you killed, my friend'' is the way it's put in the Owen poem. Mr. Jarman, whose films include ''Sebastiane'' and ''Caravaggio,'' has a weakness for the sort of baroque image that is utterly beside the point of the work of both Britten and Owen, or too much. The Poet is presented with a crown of thorns made of the barbed wire of no-man's land. Later, the Poet, who is also everyman, is stripped to the waist by a mad doctor-priest, his hands tied behind him, the better to be whipped before an audience of leering, lubricious white-faced capitalists whose cheeks are wickedly rouged. Mr. Jarman decorates a movie as much as he directs it. He makes indiscriminate use here of newsreel footage from World War I through Vietnam, with some stock shots of an A-bomb explosion thrown in.

The latter lends the film a piquant but transitory, apocalyptic effect. POETRY IN BATTLE - WAR REQUIEM, directed by Derek Jarman; screenplay by Mr. Jarman, inspired by the oratorio by Benjamin Britten, based on poems by Wilfred Owen; director of photography, Richard Greatrex; edited by Rick Elgood; music by Britten; produced by Don Boyd; production company, Anglo International Films. At the Quad, 13th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. Running time: 92 minutes. This film has no rating.

THE CAST: Laurence Olivier, Nathaniel Parker, Tilda Swinton, Owen Teale, Patricia Hayes, Claire Davenport THE RECORDING: Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; the Bach Choir and London Symphony Orchestra Chorus; Highgate School Choir; Simon Preston, organist; Melos Ensemble; London Symphony Orchestra; conducted by Benjamin Britten photo: Laurence Olivier San Francisco Symphony - BRITTEN: War Requiem, Opus 66 San Francisco Symphony Music Then and Now: Twentieth Century and Contemporary Britten: War Requiem, Opus 66 Edward Benjamin Britten was born at Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, on Saint Cecilia's Day, November 22, 1913, and died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on December 4, 1976. On June 12, 1976 he had been created Baron Britten of Aldeburgh in the Queen's Birthday Honors, the first musician to be elevated to the peerage.

The War Requiem, commissioned for the festival to celebrate the consecration of Saint Michael's Cathedral, Coventry, was composed in 1961 (completed on December 20 that year) and first performed in the Cathedral on May 30, 1962. The soloists were Heather Harper, Peter Pears, and Dietrich Fischer‑Dieskau, with the Coventry Festival Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Melos Ensemble, and the boys of Holy Trinity, Leamington, and Holy Trinity, Stratford. The chorus and full orchestra were conducted by Meredith Davies and the chamber orchestra by the composer. The first American performance took place at the Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood on July 27, 1963, Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Pro Musica Chorus of Boston, the Columbus Boychoir, and soloists Phyllis Curtin, Nicholas Di Virgilio, and Tom Krause. The San Francisco Symphony first performed the War Requiem in April 1969, when Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt conducted the Stanford University Chorus and Choir and the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

Verne Sellin conducted the chamber orchestra, and the soloists were Ella Lee, George Shirley, and Delme Bryn‑Jones. The most recent performances by the Orchestra were given in Ocotber 2002, with the SFS Chorus, San Francisco Girls Chorus, Pacific Boychoir, and soloists Christine Brewer, Jerry Hadley, and William Stone; Kurt Masur conducted.

The score calls for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists; a mixed chorus; a children’s chorus (accompanied always by an organ, played by Jonathan Dimmock at these performances); an orchestra of three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, three clarinets (third doubling E‑flat clarinet and bass clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, piano, organ, timpani, two snare drums, tenor drum, bass drum, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, castanets, whip, Chinese blocks, gong, bells tuned to C and F‑sharp, vibraphone, glockenspiel, antique cymbals tuned to C and F‑sharp, and strings; and a chamber orchestra consisting of flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion (timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbal, gong), harp, two violins, viola, cellos, and bass. Performance time: about eighty-four minutes.

Twice in Benjamin Britten's life, public awareness of his person and his work advanced dramatically, explosively. The first time was in 1945, when his opera Peter Grimes was produced for the postwar reopening of Sadler's Wells Theater in London. The second time followed the premiere at Coventry and the subsequent series of performances all across Europe and North America of the War Requiem. Except to those provincials who thought that milky pastoral was the only idiom appropriate for an Englishman and who also found the young Britten too clever by half, the triumph of Peter Grimes marked, more than the confirmation of a prodigious talent, a moment for hope that England, for the first time since the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, had produced a composer of international stature. That the premiere of Peter Grimes took place just one month after the end of the war in Europe heightened the emotional force of the occasion.

To put matters into perspective, Britten had already attracted considerable attention within the profession as the composer of, among other things, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Rimbaud song cycle Les Illuminations, Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, A Ceremony of Carols, and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and String Orchestra, as well as showing impressive aptitude for the still rather new challenges of film music. The impact seventeen years later of the War Requiem was wider and deeper by far. Britten, approaching fifty, had become since Peter Grimes the celebrated composer of several more operas, including The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; of the Spring Symphony, Saint Nicolas, and Noye's Fludde; and of song cycles on texts by Donne, Hardy, and Hölderlin. He had become an artist whose every new utterance was awaited with the most lively interest and the highest expectations.

The War Requiem, moreover, was tied to a pair of events—the destruction of Coventry Cathedral in an air raid during the night of November 14‑15, 1940 and its reconsecration more than twenty‑one years later—that were heavily freighted with history and emotion. Its first performance was planned as an international event with respect both to participants and audience. Most important, the War Requiem was a weighty and poignant statement on a subject of piercingly urgent concern to much of humankind. For 1961 was the year of the Bay of Pigs and of the construction of the Berlin Wall; both that year and in 1962, United States involvement in Vietnam increased frighteningly. Britten was a lifelong pacifist; as early as 1937 he had composed a Pacifist March for a Peace Pledge Union concert.

The critic Hans Keller, his most effective champion in the 1940s and ’50s, at one of whose dinner parties the composer maintained that the Israelis should have lain down in front of the Arab tanks in the 1967 war, speaks of Britten's "aggressive pacifism." It was a combination of his pacifism, his loyalty to left‑wing causes, and his despair at Stanley Baldwin's and later Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler that drove him to follow W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood to the United States in 1939. His companion on that journey—and for life, as it turned out—was the tenor Peter Pears, whom he had met three years before, at which time they had given a benefit recital for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. What sent Britten back to England in spring 1942 was the chance discovery, in a Los Angeles bookstore, of a volume of poetry by George Crabbe and, a few days later, of an article by E.M. Forster on Crabbe. "To think of Crabbe is to think of England," Forster began. That sentence changed Britten's life.

It made inescapable his feeling that he must go home, and it was in Crabbe's The Borough that he found the material for Peter Grimes. The theme of Peter Grimes is the collision of innocence with wickedness and corruption, innocence outraged. It is the theme that dominates Britten's life work. The composition of the War Requiem marks Britten's readiness to treat the topic explicitly rather than as a parable or in symbolic form. Twice, Britten had planned projects, both aborted for external or technical reasons, that would have been spiritual preparations to the War Requiem—an oratorio Mea culpa after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and a work to commemorate the assassination of Gandhi in 1948. In a sense, the commission from Coventry was what he was waiting for, what he needed. Britten conceived the bold plan of confronting the Missa pro defunctis, a timeless, suprapersonal ritual in a dead language, with nine poems by Wilfred Owen, words in English and written in 1917 and 1918 in hospital and in the trenches.

As a parallel gesture, the War Requiem, composed though it was for a great public occasion and in honor, as it were, of a public edifice, also bears a private dedication "in loving memory" to four of Britten's friends. Three of these—Roger Burney, Sub‑Lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; David Gill, Ordinary Seaman, Royal Navy; and Michael Halliday, Lieutenant, Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve—were killed in the dread sequel to the war in which Owen lost his life. The fourth, Captain Piers Dunkerley of the Royal Marines, became increasingly unstable after the war and committed suicide in 1959. A significant symbol Britten built into the design was to provide roles at the first performance for singers of three nationalities, the English tenor Peter Pears, the German baritone Dietrich Fischer‑Dieskau, and the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. In the event, Ekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet Minister of Culture, would not let Vishnevskaya go to Coventry. As Britten wrote to E.M. Forster, "The combination of 'Cathedral' and Reconciliation with W. Germany . . .

was too much for [the Soviets]." Vishnevskaya was eventually allowed to take part in the first recording of the War Requiem and sang in many performances after that. It was Rupert Brooke, who died on a hospital ship in 1915 at the age of twenty‑seven, who won the most immediate fame among the British poets of the 1914 war. For more than half a century now, it is Wilfred Owen who has been recognized as the most eloquent, as well as the most resourceful, of the so‑called war poets. Wilfred Owen was born at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire, on March 18, 1893, attended schools at Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, enrolled at London University, contemplated the ministry, and was both pupil and lay assistant to a clergyman in Oxfordshire. In 1915 he joined the army, a company called the Artists' Rifles.

From December 1916 he was on active service in France with the Manchester Regiment, spent five months of 1917 at Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Scotland, and, after several months of service in England, was again posted to France. He wrote verse as a boy, fluently and in emulation of Keats and, to some degree, Tennyson. Ironically, it was the war that freed his poetic gift, so that, taking stock on the last day of 1917, he was able to write to his mother: "I go out of this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet's poet. I am started." In October 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross, and on November 4 he was machine‑gunned to death while trying to get his company across the Sambre Canal. The war ended one week later. It had not taken Owen much of his apprenticeship with the Reverend Mr. Wigan to realize that his future was not in the clergy.

He distrusted the church as an institution and disliked most of its agents, military chaplains in particular, whom he saw as betraying the message of Christ. But Owen as Christian speaks better for himself. Here are words from a letter written to his mother from the 13th Casualty Clearing Station at Gailly on the Somme in May 1917: Already I have comprehended a light which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely, that one of Christ's essential commands was: passivity at any price! Suffer dishonor and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill. It may be a chimerical and an ignominious principle, but there it is. It can only be ignored, and I think pulpit professionals are ignoring it very skillfully and successfully indeed. . . . And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?. . . Christ is literally in "no man's land." There men often hear His voice: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend. Is it spoken in English only and French?

I do not believe so. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism. In Peter Grimes, the Spring Symphony, Billy Budd, and Gloriana, Britten had shown with what zest he could write for large forces, though in fact his ever-astonishing resourcefulness with restricted resources in the Serenade, the Nocturne, the chamber operas, and some of the works involving children had come to seem even more characteristic and impressive. Now, in the War Requiem, he drew on forces larger and more complex than in any previous work of his. The basic division of the performers is into two groups, reflecting the dual source of the words, which stand in a relation of text (the Latin Missa pro defunctis) and commentary (the nine Owen poems). The Latin text is the province essentially of the large mixed chorus, but from this there is spillover in two opposite directions, the solo soprano representing a heightening of the choral singing at its most emotional, the boys' choir representing liturgy at its most distanced. The mixed chorus and solo soprano are accompanied by the full orchestra; the boys' choir, whose sound should be distant, by an organ.

All this constitutes one group. The other consists of the tenor and baritone soloists, whose province is the series of Owen songs and who are accompanied by the chamber orchestra. It is well to mention at this point three compositions whose presence is felt behind the War Requiem. First we have the two great Passion settings of Johann Sebastian Bach, which, with their design of text plus commentary and the articulation of that design through textural and other compositional means, provided Britten with an important model. Then we have the Verdi Requiem. In an article published in 1968 in the British magazine Tempo, Malcolm Boyd analyzed Britten's indebtedness to that work, an indebtedness entered into not for want of originality but to establish a connection with the great tradition. Requiem aeternam—The orchestra represents stability, though the steady gait of each bar is broken from time to time, and the little bells on F-sharp and C add a certain harmonic restlessness. Against those the chorus murmurs its prayer in rapid syllables.

The music rises to a climax, sinks again to pianissimo, and then the boys sing the "Te decet hymnus" calmly, dispassionately, in meters whose irregularity seems very much not of the earth, and with violins sounding a slow echo of the bells. The opening music returns, to be suddenly broken into by the quick and agitated notes of harp, against which the tenor sings the first of the Owen tropes, "Anthem for Doomed Youth." At the second line of the sestet, "Not in the hands of boys . . .," oboe and violin bring back the “Te decet hymnus” melody. Punctuated again by the bells with their strangely unsettling dissonance, the chorus, unaccompanied, sings the "Kyrie," and on a harmonic course that carries the music from the uneasy dissonance to a peaceful close. Dies irae—This is the longest text, therefore the longest musical section as well. Distant fanfares bring the war scene before us, then chorus and orchestra in hushed staccato begin to paint the picture of the Day of Judgment.

(The key, G minor, is that of Verdi's Dies irae, and the huge outburst of brass for the "Tuba mirum" is another bow to that earlier and great Requiem.) The brass also brings about the next interpolation, "Bugles sang," an untitled poem that exists only in draft and of which Britten uses just the first seven lines. This is assigned to the baritone and uses the fanfares with which the Dies irae began.

The solo soprano is heard for the first time at the "Liber scriptus." In contrast to the majesty of her phrases, a semi‑chorus timidly asks, "Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?" A snare drum breaks into the quiet final cadence of the "Rex tremendae majestatis," and tenor and baritone together sing the bitterly cheery "The Next War." Owen's poem is a postscript to two lines addressed by Siegfried Sassoon to Robert Graves: "War's a joke for me and you,/While we know such dreams are true." The rat‑tat of that duet disappears into silence; then with great solemnity the altos begin the "Recordare." At "Confutatis maledictis" the music springs again into a fierce allegro, and that malediction is suddenly brought near as a brutal cannonade on the kettledrums introduces six lines from Owen's "Sonnet—On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought Into Action." Again the chorus invokes Judgment Day, this time in heavy fortissimo.

The music seems to move into the distance, then slowly the soprano intones the anguished, broken lines of the "Lacrimosa" (in Verdi's key of B‑flat minor). Flute and cymbal and shuddering violins, all as quiet as possible, make a screen against which the tenor whispers his "Move him into the sun," a poem from the summer of 1918 and called "Futility." This time, and to ineffably poignant effect, Britten intercuts the two musics, brief phrases of the "Lacrimosa" punctuating the grief‑laden song. Against the tenor's last word, the two bells again sound their F‑sharp and C, and the F‑sharp‑to‑F chorale with which the Requiem aeternam ended brings the Dies irae to a close as well. Offertorium—The boys begin this movement, the full chorus entering at the invocation of Saint Michael. To set "Quam olim Abrahae" as a fugue is an old tradition, and Britten follows it. Here he also quotes himself.

In 1952 he had written for Pears, Kathleen Ferrier, and himself, a Canticle, Abraham and Isaac, based on the Chester Miracle Play, and the fugue subject in the "Quam olim Abrahae" is taken from that lovely and touching work. But Wilfred Owen, too, had had his sinister say on the story of God's testing of Abraham's faith, and now it is almost without a shift of pace that the music moves into the chamber orchestra and the singing by tenor and baritone of "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young." It is perhaps the most inspired of Britten's textual connections. The music for "When lo! an angel called him out of heaven" is the voice‑of-God music from the Canticle (except that the tenor, Abraham in the earlier work, is Isaac here). With the shocking turn of the poem the music returns to the now brutish sounding fugue, and as it recedes we become aware of the boys serenely intoning the "Hostias." Sanctus—Against the whirring of high‑pitched percussion, the soprano declaims the opening words.

Her style is vocal in the grandest manner; the chorus, chanting softly on monotones, seems to want to deny the very possibility of such a style, but as layer upon layer is added, the music builds a huge crescendo of wonder and praise. The "Hosanna" is brilliant, the "Benedictus," again with the soprano, more conversational. Britten puts the commentary, "The End," after the liturgical music is done. Agnus Dei—Against hushed sixteenth notes, five of them to a bar, the tenor sings "At a Calvary near the Ancre"; the chorus, using the music of the tenor's accompaniment, sings the Agnus Dei. Britten's timing of these quiet choral interventions—after the end of Owen's first stanza, then overlapping the last two words of the second stanza, then overlapping the last words of the second and fourth lines of the last stanza—creates, with no increase in volume, a subtle heightening of intensity in the unfolding of the song/chant.

When the music appears to be over, with the chorus, barely audible, holding the final sound of "sempiternam," the tenor crosses the language border to add his own "Dona nobis pacem." This prayer for peace closes the Agnus Dei in the Ordinary of the Mass but not in the Mass for the Dead; the textual variant here is Britten's own. Most of the music in this Agnus Dei consists of alternations of segments of the scales of B minor and C major; for the tenor's haunting envoi, Britten offers a variation or extension of that—five notes of the B minor scale which can, however, also be heard as five notes of a scale of F‑sharp, then five notes of a C minor scale, with the line finally floating into silence on F‑sharp. All of it makes another version of the F‑sharp/C combination of which we hear so much in the War Requiem. Libera me—The War Requiem is full of marches, threatening, ugly Mahlerian nightmare marches, and this final prayer begins with one of them.

What the basses play after the introductory measures of the drums is a variant of the music that accompanied "What Passing‑Bells" in the first movement. The chorus keens its plea, the music gathers speed and sonority up to the explosion on "ignem," the soprano—Verdi again—stammers her "Tremens factus sum ego." The Dies irae returns and builds up to an outcry larger and more piercing than any we have experienced so far. After that, all physical energy is spent, and finally all that is left is a chord of B‑flat major, marked by Britten "pp cold." Against this, the tenor begins the final interpolation, "Strange Meeting," the poem most often cited as the summit of Owen's achievement. As both singers interweave their lines on the words, "Let us sleep now"—these were an afterthought of Owen's—the boys add their gentle "In paradisum deducant te Angeli," gradually drawing the full chorus, the soprano, and the orchestra into their music.

They themselves withdraw from the mounting mass of sound, finally to re‑enter with the first words we heard, "Requiem aeternam dona eis." Their notes are F‑sharp and C. The great liturgy and the personal anguish of one poet‑soldier have merged into one music. And now we hear for the last time that mysterious choral progression with bells, the progression from the slightly acid unrest of the F‑sharp/C tritone to the quiet of the closing chord of F major: "Requiescant in pace. Amen." The last word must go to Peter Pears, the artist who, after its creator, knew and understood the War Requiem most profoundly: "It isn't the end, we haven't escaped, we must still think about it, we are not allowed to end in a peaceful dream." —Michael Steinberg Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in 2009, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes.

His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.

More About the Music Recordings: The composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Highgate School Chorus, with the three soloists for whom the work was written: Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (London) | Kurt Masur conducting the New York Philharmonic, Westminster Symphonic Choir, and American Boychoir, with soloists Carol Vaness, Jerry Hadley, and Thomas Hampson (Teldec) | Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Atalanta Boychoir, with soloists Lorna Haywood, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, and Benjamin Luxon (Telarc) Reading: Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction, by Heather Wiebe(Cambridge University Press) | Benjamin Britten: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter (Scribner) | Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, edited by Donald Mitchell (California) | Benjamin Britten, part of the Master Musicians series, by Michael Kennedy (Schirmer) | The Britten Companion, edited by Christopher Palmer (Faber) | Remembering Britten, edited

 by Alan Blyth (Hutchinson) San Francisco Symphony Britten's War Requiem, Live from Coventry Cathedral | Classical-Music.com Britten's War Requiem, Live from Coventry Cathedral The CBSO perform Britten's War Requiem on the 50th anniversary of the premiere 28 May 2012 - 11:25am Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - 19:30 Rating: 0 On the 50th anniversary of the premiere, soloists Erin Wall, Mark Padmore and Hanno Müller-Brachmann join the CBSO and Andris Nelsons to perform Britten’s War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral.

The piece was composed for the opening of the cathedral in 1962 after it was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. Two separate orchestras made up of musicians from the CBSO, plus the combined forces of the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Youth Chorus come together to perform this remarkable work, in which texts from the liturgical mass are interspersed with poignant war poetry from Wilfred Owen . The performance is broadcast live on Radio 3 and across European television. Britten: War Requiem - Mervyn Cooke - Google Books Britten: War Requiem 1 Review Widely regarded as one of the greatest choral works of the twentieth century, Britten's War Requiem was first performed at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. It provocatively juxtaposes the vivid anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen with the Latin Requiem Mass in a passionate outcry against man's inhumanity to man.

This Handbook explores the background to Britten's use of the Owen texts, charting the development of the composer's lifelong pacifist beliefs and (in a chapter contributed by Philip Reed of the Britten-Pears library, Aldeburgh) detailing the process of composition from hitherto unpublished correspondence and manuscript sources. The musical structure is investigated, and the work's compositional idiom related to Britten's output as a whole. A concluding chapter surveys the fluctuating critical responses to the score, and includes discussion of the composer's legendary 1963 recording and Derek Jarman's controversial interpretation on film. User Review - Flag as inappropriate This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...Gaughran, Laurence. See Meath, Diocese Of. Gaul, Christian.--The Church of Gaul first appeared in history in connexion with the persecution at Lyons under Marcus Aurelius (177). The pagan inhabitants rose up against the Christians, and fortyeight martyrs suffered death under various tortures.

Among them there were children, like the slave Blandina and Ponticus, a youth of fifteen. Every rank of life had members among the first martyrs of the Church of Gaul: the aristocracy were represented by Vettius Epagathus; the professional class by Attains of Pergamus, a physician; a neophyte, Maturus, died beside Pothinus, Bishop of Lyons, and Sanctus, deacon of Vienne. The Christians of Lyons and Vienne in a letter to their brethren of Smyrna give an account of this persecution, and the letter, preserved by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., V, i-iv), is one of the gems of Christian literature. In this document the Church of Lyons seems to be the only church organized at the time in Gaul. That of Vienne appears to have been dependent on it and, to judge from similar cases, was probably administered by a deacon. How or where Christianity first gained a foothold in Gaul is purely a matter of conjecture. Most likely the first missionaries came by sea, touched at Marseilles, and progressed up the Rhone till they established the religion at Lyons, the metropolis and centre of communication for the whole country.

The firm establishment of Christianity in Gaul was undoubtedly due to missionaries from Asia. Pothinus was a disciple of St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, as was also his successor, I reiumis. In the time of i renanis Lyons was still the centre of the Church in Gaul. Eusebius speaks of letters written by the Churches of Gaul of which Irena?iis is bishop (Hist. Eccl., V, xxiii).... Selected pages What do you know about Britten’s War Requiem? | Operagasm Posted by Christie Connolley on Aug 21, 2013 in Articles , new articles | 0 comments What do you know about Britten’s War Requiem? by Cyrus Behroozi and Thomas Niday - The War Requiem was written for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral (the old cathedral is pictured at left), and was first performed there 30 May 1962. Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed during the Battle of Britain in World War II.

Britten was commissioned to write a piece for the ceremony marking the completion of a new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, built along side the the ruins of the original millenium-old structure. Since the work was to be performed inside the new cathedral, it was a good acoustic challenge for Britten. The ceremony was comprised of several works, including Tippett’s opera King Priam. The War Requiem was not meant to be a pro-British piece or a glorification of British soldiers, but a public statement of Britten’s anti-war convictions. It was a denunciation of the wickedness of war, not of other men. The fact that Britten wrote the piece for three specific soloists — a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya), and a British tenor (Peter Pears) — demonstrated that he had more than the losses of his own country in mind, and symbolized the importance of reconciliation. (Unfortunately Vishnevskaya was not available for the first performance, and had to be replaced by Heather Harper). The piece was also meant to be a warning to future generations of the senselessness of taking up arms against fellow men.

It was dedicated to four of Britten’s friends who were killed during World War I: Roger Burney, Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Piers Dunkerley, Captain, Royal Marines David Gill, Ordinary Seaman, Royal Navy Michael Halliday, Lieutenant, Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve The first London performance was on 6 Dec 1942, in Westminster Abbey. The Decca recording that we have used was recorded in 1963. The work received immediate critical acclaim and was hailed as a masterpiece. It was widely performed both in Britain and abroad. Perhaps the combination of English poetry with the familiar text of the Latin mass made the Requiem accessible to such a range of listeners and caused it to be so well received. Later, the War Requiem was incorporated into a movie with the same name. The movie, which would have otherwise been silent, is a strange, dark work. Most of it seems completely pointless, which leaves one wondering if that was the intention — to show how pointless war is.

TEXT - For the text of the War Requiem, Britten interspersed the Latin Mass for the Dead with nine poems written by Wilfred Owen (pictured at right), a World War I footsoldier who was killed a week before the Armistice. In total contrast to The Spirit of England, written by Britten’s compatriot Edward Elgar , the War Requiem was a decidedly antiwar piece. The Spirit of England was also an epic work in which poetry was set to music, but it brought forth quite a different message. View the complete text of the War Requiem “I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.” -Wilfred Owen ORCHESTRATION: The Requiem is truly a large-scale work, calling for huge musical forces. It is scored for three soloists, a chamber orchestra, a full choir and main orchestra, and a boys choir and organ. The performers are divided into three distinct planes, often physically separated.

Closest are the tenor and baritone soloists and the chamber orchestra. They portray the victims of war. The soloists sing the Owen poetry and communicate in the most personal manner of the three groups. One level removed is the orchestra and chorus, portraying the mass. The soprano soloist adds color to the voices in the chorus, but their Latin singing is less personal than that of the male soloists. Finally, the boys choir and organ present a sound that is almost inhuman. Britten recommended that a small organ be placed in the wings with the boys choir, to create a more distant sound. War Requiem at Winchester Cathedral War Requiem at Winchester Cathedral Wednesday 21 Nov 2012 Girls from Swithun Choir were invited to join boys from Winchester College Glee Club and quiristers to sing in a charity concert performance of Britten’s War Requiem in Winchester Cathedral on the 15th November. The concert was raising money for Combat Stress, an organisation which assists military veterans who have complex mental health needs.

Ellie Fleming L6, Lottie Mitchell L6, Flora Johnston U5, Phoebe Johnstone U5, India Mackay U5, Amelia Rothman U5, Patricia Drummond M5, Sophie Fleming M5 and Olivia Wilson M5 joined Winchester Music Club and distinguished soloists soprano Claire Rutter, baritone Stephen Gadd and tenor Justin Lavender for the event. Britten’s War Requiem was first performed 50 years ago, composed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral following the destruction of the original during the infamous Luftwaffe raid on the city in November 1940.

Question: Who composed the "War Requiem" for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962?
Answer: Benjamin Britten